1 My life, as it passed thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy.
2 Clerval had never sympathized in my tastes for natural science; and his literary pursuits differed wholly from those which had occupied me.
3 You were attached to each other from your earliest infancy; you studied together, and appeared, in dispositions and tastes, entirely suited to one another.
4 I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.
5 A few months before my arrival they had lived in a large and luxurious city called Paris, surrounded by friends and possessed of every enjoyment which virtue, refinement of intellect, or taste, accompanied by a moderate fortune, could afford.
6 If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.
7 When night came again I found, with pleasure, that the fire gave light as well as heat and that the discovery of this element was useful to me in my food, for I found some of the offals that the travellers had left had been roasted, and tasted much more savoury than the berries I gathered from the trees.